School of Public Health
Twin Cities
These researchers are studying whether genetic variants are, in part, responsible for the differing outcomes of kidney transplant recipients treated with similar immunosuppressive protocols. Their central hypotheses are that genetic variation is associated with kidney transplant outcome (i.e., acute rejection, chronic graft dysfunction, and graft loss) and immunosuppressive drug toxicity. The researchers will carry out genome-wide SNP association, targeting sequencing, and RNA-seq analysis for this purpose. They use MSI resources to store the genotype and RNA-seq data, and perform association tests between genotypes or gene expression and various endpoints in kidney transplantation. They are also carrying out genotype imputation to obtain best guess/dosage for un-genotyped variants using public reference panels (1000 Genomes project), which can be used to perform meta-analysis with results from other research groups to increase the power of detecting underlying genetic variants.
This research was featured on the MSI website in February 2016: Finding Genetic Markers of Transplant Rejection.